About

Global Citizenship Education (GCE) is a key target to be achieved by 2030 as part of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. It is claimed to have the potential to transform education systems, empowering learners to build more peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, and secure societies. Many education systems now expect students to actively address GCE related issues in their day-to-day lives.

Extant research has addressed challenges in developing youth activism, examining capacity building or mapping inconsistencies in theoretical approaches. However, with no systematic baseline research to show how activism is understood and appropriated by students, there is little hope of real progress by 2030.

STUDACT will explore and contextualise how students receive, understand and appropriate activism, treating them as core partners and agentic participants. Data will be collected in Poland, the US, Italy, Australia, Germany, and the UK. Four work packages give students a voice to develop meaningful agency, using group discussions, photovoice activism, and social media analysis. Policies and curricula on youth activism at various levels of governance will be gathered and analysed.

STUDACT will answer four questions :

How do students of different backgrounds understand activism?

How do students appropriate activism?

How do understandings differ within and between countries, curricula, contexts, student characteristics, and education systems?

How are student attitudes aligned with those inferred by international organisations, teacher training programmes, curricula developers, or teachers?